It is difficult to understand where economic activity is concentrated.
Because people are always swayed by prejudice and fanaticism, they are more concerned with controlling the Internet than with what it can do (though that is the real opportunity).
But one thing matters to you: it is precisely because phone companies do not "own" the Internet that it is so special.
AOL failed because it was a complex and well-managed integrated solution, with bells and whistles that satisfied the "information superhighway" vision.
They are painfully aware that neither market data nor group experience nor forecasts can imagine what a new mode of communication will look like.Just as free markets are better than regulated markets, open networks are necessary for free speech, and that is where all innovation comes from.
Now, AOL is not the worst.At least they tried to imagine how new forms of communication might work, and how it might help us do things.
Telephone companies are very interesting.
They control all channels of communication that cannot be face-to-face, and the question they ask about the Internet is: how much growth can the Internet help the telephone achieve?Sound familiar???)
They imagined people using the Internet to make phone calls and hold video meetings based on their assumptions and biases.This is a kind of low-level image thinking and design.
Another group of people didn't make assumptions about the Internet. This group won because they realized all the great innovations to date based on open, robust modules.
It will happen again with bitcoin (I stole a word from Andreas: online money).
Why is that?
Because powerful, simple, stable things are always best, and that's what physics tells us.
"At first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they beat you, then you win" -- Mahatma Gandhi
If you look at the Internet, it's almost exactly the same process:
Phone companies ignore the Internet because they use their own business metrics to evaluate it (such as the number of outgoing calls, the quality of voice calls).
After discovering that the Internet had taken off, they thought, "how do I buy the Internet?"
Once discover cannot buy come over, they are about to copy one, accordingly birth AOL
And then the Internet won, and that's what it looks like now.The telephone companies became the portals and exits of the Internet, which was larger than all the telephone companies combined.
They want to own it and let the Internet depend on it, and now they depend on the Internet.
Now that the phone companies rely on the Internet for all their services, the Internet has not only won, but the entire infrastructure has been upended.
If that is not enough, the disruption clears the way for new innovations and new opportunities.It was an opportunity that the phone companies could not exploit and thus opened the door to new global giants.
These giants are all internet-based.
I don't know about you, but the state of the Internet and phone companies has a creepy parallel to the state of bitcoin (as a currency and a currency network) and existing financial institutions.
It may sound silly to claim that financial institutions will one day base their business on bitcoin, but remember that 30 years ago anyone who claimed that phone companies were just Internet connections was considered crazy.
Please let the bullet fly for a while.
Stupid people are trying to reinvent the wheel, smart people are doing things based on bitcoin.
Dorsey, Stark, Lopp, and Rochard have already started.
That's the future
It's not just information, it's a real-time, non-stop flow of value.